Despite being published more than twenty years ago, Theodore Levitt's provocative Harvard Business Review article, “The Globalization of Markets”, continues
to underpin debates pertaining to the nature and influence of economic globalization (Quelch, 2003). Indeed, in many respects, it represented the stimulus –
in terms of being a critical point of comparison and departure – for the current
project. Widely lambasted at the time of publication by academics for its allencompassing relentless homogenization, Levitt's thesis was embraced by corporate executives who marketed standardized products globally – consumers worldwide, after years of “deprivation”, were thus able to consume the forbidden fruits
of American brands (Quelch, 2003). Levitt (1983) predicted the sophisticated
attempts by global corporations to command the widest possible market base
(through penetration of local cultures by the economics and imagery of global
capitalism), and thereby accrue the benefits derived from the realization of
colossal economies of scale. In this early stage of corporate globalization, Levitt
famously identified that companies operated “as if the entire world (or major
regions of it) were a single, largely identical entity” and subsequently attempted
to sell the “same things in the same way everywhere” (Levitt, 1983, p. 22).

Despite enthusiasm from within the corporate ranks, Levitt's mantra appeared
to stall with increased competition and responses, from local brands and from
backlash against global brand saturation. Most organizations soon realized the
impracticability of treating the global market as a single, homogenous entity.
The advancement of capitalism has always been about the overcoming of spatial
constraints as a means of improving the flow of goods from producer to consumer
(Hall, 1991; Morley, 1995), but this intrinsically rationalizing logic of market
capitalism came unstuck when faced by the “warm appeal of national affiliations
and attachments” (Robins, 1997, p. 20). So, rather than attempting to neuter

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